


Four Walls

by panchostokes (badwolfrun)



Series: Prompt Fics [39]
Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Episode: s05e24-25 Grave Danger, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, team as a family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-18 02:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21620329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badwolfrun/pseuds/panchostokes
Summary: The five times Nick casually references his burial, and the one time he's not so subtle.
Relationships: Catherine Willows & Nick Stokes, Gil Grissom & Nick Stokes, Greg Sanders & Nick Stokes, Sara Sidle & Nick Stokes, Warrick Brown & Nick Stokes
Series: Prompt Fics [39]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1540795
Comments: 4
Kudos: 19





	Four Walls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Danni_Lea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Danni_Lea/gifts).



> THIS is the prompt that made me cry just thinking about it, and I gotta thank you, @dannilea for giving me the prompt, and @impossiblepluto and @12percentplan for helping me brainstorm, cause this fic could have gone in so many directions. warning for suicide mention.

Nick had returned to work with a rekindled fire in his eyes, a spring in his step, an aura around him that exuded this wholesome optimistic energy because he was _alive._ He was not unfamiliar with the brink of death, but his most recent trauma had brought him closer than ever before, just _seconds_ away before he was pulled from the depths of the earth, away from a fiery army that was tearing his skin apart bite by bite. 

“How you doing, Nick?” a question and its variations that he has had to answer more times than he can count on both of his hands, asked by a paramedic that he had been used to seeing at crime scenes before.

Including his own.

But it’s an innocent question, no need to snap back. While he _hates_ talking about his feelings, talking to therapists, he had to admit that they had a point, when one had warned him that everyone and their mother would be asking him the same question. He had been warned that it might be annoying, having to answer the question over and over, but that they’re doing it “just because they care about you _so much,_ Nick.” 

“Above ground, Wilcox.” 

And so he goes down the route of lightheartedness, trying to bring some humor to the horrific ordeal, because otherwise, he’d have to tell them the truth, a truth he doesn’t even want to acknowledge himself. 

He shares a smile and a quiet laugh with Sara, who admires the comment, the sign that Nick is willing to laugh about it all, and move on with his job, with his life. 

After being buried alive, the only way to move forward, is to move up.

* * *

“Man, I just can’t believe this lock down on overtime Ecklie’s got,” Nick mutters as he plops down at the break room table next to Catherine. “And yet he still expects us to do the same amount of work in a less amount of time.”

“What, you worked up about the looming stack of paperwork over Grissom’s head, too? Cause you know he’s the reason we’re so behind.” 

“Yeah, it’s been kind of eating me alive on his behalf, you know?“ Nick laughs mid-chew, swallows hard as he realizes what he just said, and how the scraping of utensils against bowls and plates has stopped, how the air flow in the room seems tight, how he felt phantoms legs crawling through his skin, teeth penetrating his blood vessels. 

He lets out a small groan and rubs his chin with the back of his hand, but is relieved when Catherine starts laughing, albeit a bit awkwardly, and the rest of the break room chimes in, including Nick, who waits about a minute before finding an excuse to leave the room.

* * *

He and Warrick are on a case in a funeral home, an already morbidly awkward situation, investigating a murder at a funeral, and Nick of course, found himself transfixed on the coffins that were decorated with more luxury than his own.

“I don’t know man, it’s making me kinda jealous, seeing how soft and padded these caskets are,” Nick muses, holding up a small pillow from inside one of the coffins. “This would have made things a hell of a lot more comfortable.”

He turns to Warrick with a sly smile on his face that falters as he sees the shocked expression on his partner’s face, his eyebrows curved, lips pursed together. Stunned silence instead of a shared appreciation of the joke, and Nick suddenly feels uneasy. He hates the way Warrick looks at him, breaks the silence before the three dreaded words are spoke into the air. 

“Lighten up, War! Just a joke.” 

Nick claps his hand on Warrick’s shoulder before he walks away, and Warrick lets out his breath with a small chuckle, clapping back on Nick’s shoulder, though not with the same force. It’s awkward, and Nick cringes inwardly after he clears his throat, and moves to the other side of the room.

* * *

It’s not that he doesn’t trust Nick, nor that he doubts his ability to take part in a cognitive interview with a sole survivor of a bombing incident. Nick’s better suited when it comes to talking to victims and their families, but Grissom would be lying to himself if he didn’t admit that he was worried about Nick’s fragility. 

And he should know better, of course. 

He knows _Nick_ better than this.

But perhaps it’s his guilt, that allows him to sit on the sidelines, let Nick take the lead. 

It’s only the second biggest mistake he’s made in the span of a year.

“It…it was so dark. I couldn’t see anything, I felt…felt like the walls were closing in…There was this, this ringing that didn’t stop, it still–hasn’t stopped. There was so much…smoke and dust in the air.”

“What do you see, when the smoke cleared?”

“A-a hand. Reaching out. Taking mine. And I just thought…it’s over. I made it. I made it through the darkest time in my life. I was _saved.”_

Nick takes the woman’s hand, sandwiches it between his own. 

“That’s what I thought, too,” he tells the woman in barely a whisper, Grissom doesn’t _hear_ it but reads it through the slightest movements in Nick’s lips. 

* * *

He doesn’t know why, but he still volunteers to work on the underside of the car, perhaps out of his desire to see the complicated interior versus the manicured, shiny exterior of the machine.

He would much rather prefer to do so if he didn’t have to be on his back.

A condition which he tries to ignore by singing along to the music on the radio, though Alice in Chains doesn’t exactly match up to his tastes. It was Greg’s pick, though he seemed to not be too focused on the song, but rather the singer. 

_“Down in a hole...feelin' so small...down in a hole...losin' my soul...”_ Nick sings along under his breath, pauses as he zooms in on something that looks like blood, or hair. Or bloodied hair. 

“Yo, G, toss me a socket wrench, wouldja? Think I found something down here…” 

“Are you okay?” Greg blurts out as he stares at Nick through the hole in the car.

“Hmm?” Nick asks, as he rolls himself out from underneath the car. He pretends as if he didn’t hear the words that set his heart into a frenzy, his brain working overtime, because he doesn’t know how to answer.

He could lie, of course, and it’s his gut instinct to lie, to shield his friend from the heaviness of the weight upon his shoulders. 

Part of him wants to tell him the truth. Spill the beans that he’s been working to keep bottled inside of him since his abduction. 

And another part of him wants to test Greg, see if he’s even up to the task. 

_“What would you say if I wasn’t?”_

No, too harsh. He dials it back, just a little. 

“Course I am, man. Why-why wouldn’t I be?” Nick shrugs as he wipes his hands on a towel. 

“Just that, uh…I can’t tell how you feel about things these days. I can usually get a good read on you, your emotions, when to joke around with you, when to steer clear and lately I just…can’t.”

“What, you worried I’m just gonna…explode?”

“Maybe.”

“You want to know how I _truly_ feel about it all, Greg?” he sneers before he roughly tosses the towel to the table, the impact of which is rougher than he intended, makes Greg jump. He walks over to him, stands almost nose to nose with the man. He can nearly feel Greg’s heart beat as rapidly as his own. Can feel Greg’s nervous breath blossom on his face. Can hear the words just itching to rise out of Greg’s mouth, but they stay inside of him. Nick nods, lowers his head with a dark, low laugh. 

“Thought so.” 

Nick turns away from Greg and leaves the room without another word, roughly slamming the door behind him. 

* * *

The blinds are closed on the windows to Grissom’s office. The second indication to him that something is up. The first one was a gentle tap on the shoulder, a whispered, “can you come to my office, please?” in his ear from his boss. 

He swallows the lump of anxiety throbbing inside his Adam’s apple, the nervous energy transfers to his fingers as he clutches the door knob. He knows the layout of Grissom’s office as well as he knows the layout of his own house, but when he opens the door and crosses the threshold, he feels like he’s entering some unfamiliar place. 

A familiarly foreign place filled with five of his closest loved ones. 

“Hey, y’all, what’s...what’s going on?” he stammers with an attempted charming smile, to disarm them, because they’re all standing with folded arms and frowns and sad, furrowed eyebrows. 

“How you doing, buddy?” Warrick is the first to speak in a low voice, closing the door gently behind Nick. He places himself in front of the door, and Nick finds himself in a sloppy circle of intervention. He feels as if he’s fallen into a trap, or thrown into some sort of prison until he gets his shit together. 

“I’m fine, Rick.”

“You look tired, Nicky,” Catherine says, and Nick spins to face her. 

“Just...rough night of sleep.” 

“Do you sleep at all anymore?” Sara asks, Nick is starting to get dizzy as he whips his head around again.

“Been...trying.”

“I told you, Nicky, you didn’t have to come back so quick--” Grissom begins.

“What is this all about?” Nick deflects.

“Yes,” Greg pipes up. 

They all turn to look at Greg, who had slunk away towards the shadows that line the perimeter of the room. He makes direct eye contact with Nick, and Nick’s body stiffens, straightens his back. 

“To answer your earlier question,” he elaborates. 

“Care to share the question with the rest of the class, Sanders?” Warrick asks, and Nick knows that he already knows what it’s referring to, he’s just using it as a prompt. 

“I want to know how you _truly feel,_ Nick.”

“We all do.”

“We’re your friends.”

“We’re here to listen.”

“L-listen to what?” Nick stammers again, stifles a noise that rises through his chest, burns at the corners of his eyes. 

“You’ve been tip-toeing around it for the last couple of weeks, making the odd remark here or there...you’re still traumatized from the...the coffin.” 

He starts to laugh.

“This isn’t a joke, Nick,” Catherine scoffs. 

“How would you know, huh? Been abducted, recently? Been hog-tied in the boot of an SUV, suffocated with a cloth drenched in ether? Have you been...shoved into a box that seems like it was built for you--but it wasn’t,” Nick waggles his finger, wipes his mouth before continuing. “Nah, nah, you wouldn’t quite fit. You have to keep your legs bent, one arm on top of your chest at all times. Tossed into the ground before your time, given nothin’ but a couple little glowing sticks and a tape recorder that tells you this is all because you were just doing your job, which I’d really like to get back to--”

He makes a start towards the door, but Warrick still blocks the way. They both huff and pant as Nick keeps trying to push past him, but Warrick’s a rock, unmovable. 

Nick shakes his head and walks back into the center of the poorly formed circle, waits a minute for someone else to start talking, but nobody does. 

“Oh, a-and don’t forget about the _loaded gun_ that you’re supposed to just kill yourself with. You saw it, didn’t you, Warrick? The gun pressed up against my chin, right before y’all dug me up?” 

Nick raises his voice to compensate for the stark silence.

“I was so...goddamn close, man. I was even...even hallucinating my own fuckin’ autopsy. And the whole time, I just kept...kept wishing for it. For it all to end, but I didn’t...I didn’t want to go until I was c-certain y’all weren’t coming. Or...until that fan ran out, whichever came first.”

The room is as quiet as the box was in those moments, save for his own shaky breathing.

“And that damn fan...the whole time, I thought it was that...asshole who put me in there, just dickin’ around with me, turning that light on and off and on and off...”

He allows another strangled laugh to escape his lips, but it’s hollow. 

“You say you’re listening to me now, but you weren’t, back then. When you were all _watching._ There was just some point where I kept...begging. Begging for him to just fuckin’ kill me already, because what's the point? Why I am I still here? Kill my feelings, kill my soul, kill everything I am…Just…kih--” he chokes on the words, squeezes his face in concentration on keeping it in, keeping it all in, because none of them deserve to see this weakness.

To see the _real him._

He wants to say more, because somehow, in his words, he feels like his shoulders are _just_ a little lighter. If he keeps talking, maybe the weight will be gone entirely. 

But when he opens his mouth, his tongue is twisted in a knot, and he’s heaving forward, he’s about to fall to his knees when something catches him and wraps him into a tight embrace, reminiscent of the way his mother hugs him, his head cradled in her hand, buried into her shoulder. 

He feels a hand claps heavily onto his shoulder, holding him firm, like his older brother would when the others were picking on him.

He feels a gentle pat slide down his upper arm, gripping him the way that his sisters so often do when they’re greeting him or saying goodbye. 

A soft touch slides down his back, stroking him his spine. An intimate gesture, one he doesn’t quite expect, nor desire, until he realizes that it comes from a trusted source. It tickles him at first, but with every stroke he settles into the feeling of absolute comfort, from four separate sources, and he doesn’t think it can get any better until he feels one of his hands tangled in the fingers of another man’s grip.

A firm grip.

Like his father’s.

“We got you, Nicky. We got you,” murmured whispers into his ear, and he’s thrown back into that desperate moment in time where he hung onto every word, reached out for any physical contact he could latch onto, his salvation.

And just as he did back in that god forsaken hole, in this moment, he believes their words. The four walls of Grissom’s office don’t feel like a prison, they feel like a _home._


End file.
